Smonk

Go on, Loon said out of the side of his mouth. I ain’t going nowhere. And don’t ye pint at me, neither, ye dang shit-kicker, and do me like ye done that other fellow.

You mean Deputy Onan? Don’t you know anybody’s names?

Yeah I know they names.

What’s mine?

Yer what?

Name, Loon. What? Is? My? Name?

Hang on. Who the hell’s “Loon”?

Why, you are.

Since when?

Since quite early in the adventure.

Dang a bunch of loons. My name is Oswald Heidebrecht.

Whatever. I’m still going.

Jest don’t kill me like ye did that other knucklehead. Omar, was it?

I told you. Onan. And that was coincidence.

Oh? Loon held up his fist and slowly unfurled his “pointer” finger in Walton’s direction.

Fine, fine, the leader said, tugging his ascot. You’ve made your point.

They stared at one another, surprised at the pun.

Loon began to giggle.

Walton, despite his best efforts, joined him.

Their laughter rang out, an alien noise in this diorama of drought.

Stop, Walton said. Shhhhh. If he thinks we’re laughing at him, he may open fire again.

The mood sombered, and soon the sky had pushed a red moon out of the eastern trees.

I’m going, Walton said.

Watch ye ass, said Loon.

Watch “ye” own, the leader responded. He tapped Donny’s flanks with his heels and the horse sprang into a trot, eager to quit this part of the state’s geography. Walton held his breath and bounced along in the dark with his eyes closed, trusting Donny’s finely shod hooves. Here he was, alone in the South—truly alone—for the first time, fully expecting to be shot at any moment, prickles of fear hiving his skin and “butterflies” flittering in his abdomen.

Yet he was strangely happy.

In the Tate house, Ike climbed the stairs to Smonk’s room and dribbled piss in the slop jar and stood over Eugene watching as the one-eye labored for air and tossed and flinched in pain. Each breath one closer to his merciful last. Ike folded his arms. What a specimen Eugene had been long ago, down in Mexico. Out in the west past the Rocky Mountains. Ike remembered showing him the Grand Canyon. The Mississippi River. How to hold a largemouth bass by its jaw. He remembered Eugene’s fight with a boy a couple of years older than he was. Ike and Smonk had been fishing in a deep-woods Texas pond that wore moss like a beard when a white boy of seventeen or so had crashed out of the bushes. He had several dead squirrels hanging on his belt and brandished his paltry twenty-gauge shotgun to rob them. Smonk had looked at Ike with eyes that were nearly white. No, Ike had said but Smonk was already on the boy who never fired a shot, and when Ike snatched E.O. off—careful of those teeth—he saw the bites on the screaming boy’s neck. Instead of letting the boy suffer the horror of the ray bees, Ike dragged him into the pond and held him under. With Smonk skipping rocks across the water, Ike waited and watched and turned away only when bubbles stopped blooping in the moss. Then Ike had gathered their things, wondering (not for the first time) how Eugene could watch death’s red flower bloom and throw another rock, eat another apple, go back to sleep.

Now the colored man took up his shotgun from the corner. Jest sleep on, he thought and closed the door behind him and turned the key in its lock and descended the stairs, stepping around boards that might creak, not looking at the dead man in the parlor or his widow drooling on the sideboard.

He went out into the alley and down the back of the doctor’s and let himself in through a window. In the office he struck a match and read the labels of the brown medicine bottles and selected this one and that. He moved through the house and peered into the main room where the doctor lay dead, his widow standing at the window staring out. She sensed him and turned. He caught her before she could scream and clamped a cloth rag over her mouth, her husband’s own chloroform fainting her instantly.

Outside he crept building to building wiring dynamite. He’d just finished and stood to stretch his back when he spied another lady in black walking along the livery barn wall with a bucket. She set it down and reached back in her hair and shadowed her face with a veil. Then she and her pail slipped in the livery door and a moment later the same door opened and another lady came out covering a yawn. She threw back her veil to the air.

Ike crept along the livery’s shadowed east wall. The barn had spaces between boards and it was through such a space that he saw the girl in the cell. Lanternlight yellowing the hay. The lady he’d seen go in was guarding her. The bucket was her stool.

He twisted his head to better see.

It was her.

O God here she was. He’d never seen her before, but he knew it was her. He turned his shoulders to the wall and leaned against it, sinking to his backside where he sat for a long minute. He looked up at the sky. He didn’t believe it. What you gone do next? he asked the stars. What ain’t you gone do?

He hurried back through the alley to the house and inside, past Mrs. Tate in her restless sleep, up the stairs into the room. Eugene hadn’t stirred. His belly rose and fell and the air seemed fouler from his dying. Ike set the medicine bottles along the table and selected one and another and mixed them and poured them into Eugene’s whiskey gourd. He sat in a chair in the corner thinking. Then stood and squeaked opened the chifforobe and gazed at the colors. A moment later, his arms full of clothes, Ike left the room.

When the key clicked in the lock Smonk opened his eyes. He rocked back and forth on the bed, gathering momentum, then rolled onto the floor. Ike was gone. He stood sucking air into the bloody scraps of his lungs. He reached for his glasses and gourd and unstoppered it and drank deeply.

Little morphine kick, he said, raising the licker. Brother Isaac, I thank ye.

He drank again and hung the gourd around his neck and took one of the bottles and stripped the sheet from the bed. He hefted his lucky detonator and grabbed the coil of wire. Downstairs Ike was gone, and Mrs. Tate had barely moved, just the hitch of her shoulders as she snored. She wore black, which made her tinier.

He set his wares down quietly and undid the gourd and drank again. He found the snake of wire Ike had left and twisted it to the wire he’d brought and hitched it up to the detonator. He disappeared down the hall and returned holding a broom and, behind the old woman, flapped out the bedsheet and within a moment had employed a trick he’d learned from Kansas City teamsters where you fasten your victim to his chair with a sheet, tightening the sheet by a broom handle affixed to the back. With nothing showing but her neck and head, he twisted the handle and stood behind her where she couldn’t see him and held her until she stopped convulsing.

I got some questions for ye, he said, blowing hot sulfur breath in her ear.

He thumbstruck a match and lit a candle on the sideboard by Justice Tate’s head.

The old lady wriggled in her cocoon and he tightened it a turn. She was trying to shake her head but his hand had her face. Behind her, he looked down her length, points of her feet at the bottom.

You won’t get away, he said. Especially if I have to strangulate ye. But if ye swar to be a good ole girl, I’ll let ye loose at the mouth. All right?

Rage in her roiling eyes and the electric rod of her body, but he held her as long as she could flex and presently she went limp and he loosened the broom.

Okay. There. He lifted his palm from her mouth and moved around into the candlelight. Red bars the shape of his fingers and thumb on her cheeks.

Who—her voice a jar of wet sand opened—Who are you?

He leaned his head closer and removed the hat and glasses, his good eye twinkling in the candlelight.

When she saw who it was her body spasmed anew.

What’s the matter? he asked, muffling her screams. Ain’t ye glad to see me?

Christian Deputy Loon, meanwhile, heard a horse fast approaching and, careful not to point, tried to flag